Well, if you're a research geek you probably see a negatively skewed distribution.

If you like ski jumps, maybe you see a day of winter fun.

And if you look a little closer you'll see that this is a graph of the number of mindfulness studies published per year between 1980 and 2012.

So, in 1980 and 1981 there were exactly zero articles published on the topic of mindfulness. Between 1982 and 1998 there was a very gradual trend toward a few more mindfulness articles each year.

And then something crazy happened. Between the year 2000 and 2012 there was almost an exponential explosion of research publications about mindfulness meditation.

This trend has only continued. For example, last month alone saw the publication of 65 new mindfulness articles. Amazingly, that's pretty standard for the current monthly output.

Meaning that, on average, we now publish more articles per month than we published in an entire year only a decade ago.

So what are we discovering through this lavish investment of research dollars?

Well, for one thing, targets are getting a lot more targeted. While early mindfulness articles often examined how an eight-week MBSR course affected an unidentified group of participants, the new generation of articles boasts titles like: